Welcome to Thunderdome

Malcolm wrote:VHA is so fucked it needs to be shut down.

The Choice Card program allows veterans to seek private medical care if VA is unable to provide it within a month of being requested, or if there is no VA facility near their homes. Not long after the program began, however, non-VA doctors and hospitals began complaining they weren’t being paid for their services.

A survey of non-VA hospitals in Florida, for example, found VA owed more than $100 million in unpaid claims for services provided to veterans under the Choice Card program. Sixty percent of the hospitals described the problems in getting paid as inexplicable, with their claims mysteriously getting “lost.”

A growing number of doctors across the country are refusing to treat patients using the Choice Card for fear of never being paid.

The agency said it has retrained thousands of schedulers and is updating software to make it easier for them to book appointments properly. A pilot program at 10 facilities allows veterans to book their own appointments, and the VA expects to roll that out nationwide, according to David Shulkin, a physician who took over as undersecretary for health at the VA in June.

Shulkin told USA TODAY he also initiated two massive, same-day efforts to try to provide care sooner for more than 100,000 veterans, and he said the agency also has increased capacity to get wait times down.

“We’ve expanded appointments, we have added evening hours and weekend hours, we’ve added 3 million square feet of space, we’ve hired 14,000 new providers,” he said.

In 2010, VA officials discovered schedulers were using “gaming strategies” to falsify wait times to meet agency performance targets, and they required all schedulers to undergo new training, once again.
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In the newly released reports, investigators found schedulers were using the same strategies. Most commonly, schedulers would start the wait clock on the day of the appointment they were booking rather than when the veteran wanted to be seen. The system then showed there was no wait time even if the veteran had to wait weeks or months for an appointment.

Leisher wrote:For the first time in its 73 year existance, the NFIB is opposing a Supreme Court nomination.

They're saying that Obama is lying about the candidate being moderate and that he's fallen on the side of the government in almost every case he's ever heard. The exceptions being when the other side was a union.

Duggan cites Garland’s decisions involving the EPA, the Commerce Clause and the NLRB as just a few examples of major concern. She writes, “What worries us is that Judge Garland has been consistently wrong on labor law. In fact, in 16 major labor decisions of Judge Garland’s that we examined, he ruled 16-0 in favor of the NLRB.”

If Republicans block Garland too long the next option could be much worse.

UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said the company expects losses from its exchange business to total more than $1 billion for this year and last.

They didn't fuck the middle class hard enough, I guess.

GORDON wrote:United Health Care, biggest health insurer in country, pulling back from Obamacare.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/04 ... osses.html

UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said the company expects losses from its exchange business to total more than $1 billion for this year and last.

Considering we got screwed so badly with our new health insurance plans, I'm not sure how they can now be losing money. They didn't fuck the middle class hard enough, I guess.

Historian Gar Alperovitz details in his classic study, Atomic Diplomacy, that the decision to drop the bomb was initiated largely to circumvent a Russian invasion of Japan and to ensure an American sphere of influence in the Asia-Pacific after the war. Japan was never even given the chance to respond after the first atomic bomb before the second was dropped on Nagasaki killing another 80,000 people and scarring countless more.

Time military analyst Hanson Baldwin concluded shortly after the war that, “The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position by the time the Potsdam demand for surrender was made on July 26. Such then was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Need we have done it? No one can of course be positive, but the answer is certainly in the negative.”

"This suit represents the first time in our nation's history that Congress has been permitted to sue executive branch over a disagreement about how to interpret a statute," Earnest said during his daily briefing. "These are the kinds of political disputes that characterize a democracy. It's unfortunate that Republicans have resorted to a taxpayer-funded lawsuit to re-fight a political fight they keep loosing [sic]."